INCREDIBLES 2: Predictable Plotwise, But Still A Solid Sequel

Opening tonight at a multiplex near everybody:

INCREDIBLES 2 (Dir. Brad Bird, 2018) 

At the screening of this long awaited sequel, there was a mini-featurette before the movie began in which the film’s stars – Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, and Samuel L. Jackson – stress more than once that while it’s been 14 years since the original, this’ll be well worth the wait. For the most part it is.

Mere months after the events of the first installment, we catch up with the crime-fighting Parr family – Bob/Mr. Incredible (Nelson), Helen/Elastigirl (Hunter), Violet (Sarah Vowel), Dashiell/”Dash” (Huck Milner), Violet and Jack-Jack Parr (Eli Fucile) – as they are trying to thwart a bank robbery by the returning supervillain, the Underminer (voiced by Pixar regular John Ratzenberger).

This results in a pretty thrilling, funny and gorgeously animated opening sequence involving the Incredibles, with the help of the icy touch of Lucius Best/Frozone (Jackson), pulling together to stop a ginormous drilling machine from reaching its Metro Bank destination, and the follow-up is off to a great start.

Things settle down a bit when the premise is introduced by a couple of new characters, telecommunications CEO Winston Deavor (a slick Bob Odenkirk), and his tech saavy sister, Evelyn (a more energetic than usual Catherine Keener). The Deavors wants to arrange a campaign that will make the use of super powers legal again, and recruit Elastigirl to go off and fight crime in the dangerous city of New Urbrem, while Bob stays home to take care of the kids to his great disappointment.

But while stranded at home, Bob learns that Jack-Jack has an array of super powers (17, he says at one point) including being able to shoot lasers out of his eyes, teleport through walls, turn himself into fire, and change into a scary red monster (sort of a like a fiery Tazmanian Devil) if he’s denied a cookie.

Since Odenkirk’s Winston is such an unabashed fanboy of the Incredibles who knows the words to all of their individual theme songs, he stands out as a candidate for the film’s secret bad guy, but gladly screenwriter Bird knows that would be too obvious.

As for the film’s up front villain, there’s the Screenslaver, dressed in black with big goggles like a cartoon Kylo Renn, who can hypnotize people through their screens. There’s also the thread that the secret baddie (I won’t Spoil their identity) has devised glasses that control the wearer in order to frame them doing acts of evil.

That’s a pretty predictable plotline that’s been done to death, but the action and laughs come so fast and frenetically in the film’s last third, which is set on runaway ship headed to crash into New Urbrem, that it really doesn’t get in the way of the extreme entertainment factor.

Sure, the overall world of the INCREDIBLES doesn’t feel as fresh as it did in 2004 (still looks really cool though), but despite its formulaic flaws, it’s a joy to spend time with these characters again on another fast paced ride. INCREDIBLES 2 is a solid sequel that should please the many big fans of the first one, as it did a casual fan like me. Thanks for the update, Bird, Pixar, and all the great voice talent – see you in another 14 years!

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The 2018 Oscar® Nominated Short Films: Animated

Death, fairy tales, bullying, a player’s love of his game, and frogs are the subjects of this year’s group of Oscar-nominated animated shorts which are playing at various theaters near me alongside programs of the likewise nominated Live Action and Documentary shorts.

The 90th Academy Awards® will be broadcast live on March 4th, so there’s plenty of time to catch up with these short films, and good reason too as they’re a pretty pleasing batch.

The first animated short, Glen Keane and Kobe Bryant’s DEAR BASKETBALL, is Bryant’s love letter to his sport, based on a letter he wrote to The Players’ Tribune in 2015 announcing his retirement.

Bryant is depicted in sketchy hand-drawn animation from when he was a child shooting imaginary game-winning shots with rolled-up tube socks in his bedroom, to imagery of him making his famous moves that won five NBA championships with the Lakers as an adult.

It’s a swift and fluid five minute film, but it feels like a commercial or beginning of a feature length documentary. It’s no doubt a sincere, and well-intentioned ode, but it still struck me as self-promotion and I wasn’t moved by it that like I bet somebody who’s a fan or into basketball would be.

Anyway, onto a very differently toned short, GARDEN PARTY which was written and directed by Victor Caire, Florian Babikian, Vincent Bayoux, Théophile Dufresne, Lucas Navarro and Gabriel Grapperon.

That’s right, it was made by six French 3D artists, who dub themselves Illogic Collective, during their studies at MoPA, animation school in France.

The seven minute movie concerns a group of amphibians exploring the immaculately detailed grounds and interiors of a mysteriously abandoned mansion. The frogs and toads swim in the pool, feast on rotten food, and inadvertently turn on the house’s lights, stereo system, and outside sprinklers by jumping on the buttons of a control panel. The photo realism is stunning, so much so that the visuals border on the grotesque especially when we find out what happened to the estate’s former resident.

These students’ production definitely deserves to win, but I’m thinking that because of its dark undertone it’ll probably be passed over.

Every year, Pixar has a short in competition and Dave Mullins and Dana Murray’s LOU, about a schoolyard bully being taught a lesson by the contents of a lost and found box, is their entry this time around. 

In a colorful animation style that should be well familiar to anyone who’s seen any of the Disney subsidiary’s movies, the film tells the story of a mean kid who steals his classmates belongings – such as a red hoodie, a couple of baseballs, a football, a piggy doll, a pitcher’s mitt, an orange and white scarf, a slinky, a toy truck, a jump rope, a book, a shoe, a lunch box, a hat and a tennis racket.

I listed all of those items because they come together to form an anthropomorphic character with the baseballs as its eyes. After a hilarious scuffle, the bully is punished by having to return all the things he stole, and is redeemed just as you thought he would be. LOU, which originally ran before showings of CARS 3, is a predictably pleasing six-minute piece of fast paced Pixar fun, but since they won last year with the charming PIPER, I doubt this is their year.

The following short, Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata’s NEGATIVE SPACE also concerns the assorted contents of a box, but this time it’s a suitcase and it’s about a father teaching his son how to properly pack it for a trip. 

The French film is an adaptation of a poem by Ron Koertge via a neat-looking stop motion world of models and miniatures. It’s a charmer with a touchingly witty conclusion, and, funnily enough, it’s the second short of the bunch that animates the rolling up of socks (DEAR BASKETBALL is the other). I can totally see this one winning.

At 28 minutes in length, Jakob Schuh and Jan Lachauer’s REVOLTING RHYMES is the longest of the animated shorts. It is an adaptation of a 1982 Roald Dahl book of poems satirizing six famous fairy tales that’s narrated by The Wire’s Dominic West as the big, bad Wolf.

The Wolf tells his story to a kindly woman in a café about Red Riding Hood and a blonde Snow White meeting at the funeral for Snow White’s mother. We learn that Red Riding Hood keeps her money in a bank made out of many piggy banks run by one of the three little pigs, and that Snow White’s father, the King (voiced by Rob Brydon of those TRIP movies with Steve Coogan) marries a crude woman, Miss Maclahose, who has a magic talking mirror for the “who’s the fairest” bit. The seven dwarfs appear as ex-horse race jockeys, who ask the mirror which horse to bet on as Snow White pines for her Prince, and so on.

Dahl’s dark spin on these familiar stories is illustrated by computer animation that at times resembles the work of Aardman Animations (Wallace & Gromit) despite not involving clay. The rhymes aren’t really revolting, but there are some grim fates for some of the characters. As the film feels a bit stiff, it may be my least favorite of the animated shorts, but the British-German production just may tickle enough Academy voters to get it the gold.

Since four of the five films run around five to seven minutes, there are three bonus shorts to pad out the Animated Shorts package to feature length: Kevin Hudson’s WEEDS, Daniel Agdag’s LOST PROPERTY OFFICE, and Lucas Boutrot, Élise Carret, Maoris Creantor, Pierre Hubert, Camille Lacroix, and Charlotte Perroux’s ACHOO! I ‘m not going to go into any detail about these “commended” shorts, but I will say that ACHOO! about a sneezing Chinese dragon who invents fireworks is my favorite of them.

If you haven’t already check out my reviews of the Oscar® Nominated Live Action Shorts.

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2 Summer Sequels: FINDING DORY & INDEPENDENCE DAY 2 – Guess Which One Doesn’t Suck

Film Babble Blog is back! I have returned from my summer vacation, a wonderful trip to Iceland with my wife and her parents, and am refreshed and ready to tackle a couple of the latest movie offerings. And it’s a couple of summer sequels which I caught up with at the Mission Valley Cinema multiplex in Raleigh over the last weekend.

First up, there’s Andrew Stanton and Angus MacLane’s FINDING DORY, the long awaited follow-up to one of Pixar’s most beloved (and profitable) productions, 2003’s FINDING NEMO.



Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres wonderfully reprise their roles as the voices of Marlin and Dory, an orange over-protective clownfish and a regal blue tang fish, while 11 year old Hayden Rolence takes over the role of Nemo, as the original’s Alexander Gould is too old to voice the part (he does get a cameo though).

As one can guess from the title, this time Dory goes missing when she’s captured by pesky humans and taken to the Monterey Marine Life Institute.

This is after we learn Dory’s sad back story – how she got lost from her parents (voiced by Eugene Levy and Diane Keaton), and searched the cold, dark depths of the ocean. looking for them as she grew from being voiced by Sloane Murray, the 7-year old daughter of producer Lindsey Collins into DeGeneres’ distinctive Dory diction.


Marlin, and Nemo, with the help from a couple of cockney sea lions voiced by Idris Elba and Dominic West (a mini-The Wire reunion!), a whale shark (Kaitlin Olson), and a beluga whale (Ty Burrell), along with various other aquatic characters, attempt to rescue Dory, while she makes a deal with a cranky seven-armed red octopus, voiced by Ed O’Neil, that he’ll help her get out of the institute so she can go find her parents if she’ll give him her ID tag so he gets to go to Cleveland in her place.



Of course, you gotta expect themes about family, and being in the moment like Dory - “be like Dory” becomes Marlin's mantra at a crucial moment. Everyone needs to find their inner Dory, the film appears to advise.


FINDING DORY is a solid sequel, gorgeously animated (the Open Ocean Exhibit sequence particularly pops), with countless gags that land (love the Sigourney Weaver running gag that I won’t spoil), and all the right kind of emotional feels. Sure, there’s still a predictable formula at play, but the formula works because they truly take the fish out of the water. 

With a lot of the action happening on land, director/co-screenwriter Andrew Stanton and the creative crew here came up with tons of clever ways to keep the fish alive by jumping from buckets to cups or going from spouting geyser to geyser, right up until the crazy climax that involves ducks, a stolen truck, and a police blockade.

Of course, it’s not as fresh as the first time around, and with Pixar’s upcoming calendar being clogged with sequels (THE INCREDIBLES 2, CARS 3, TOY STORY 4) it’s easy to be cynical about yet another franchise, but if the quality control is as high as it here, I’m not going to scoff at the idea of a third FINDING film.

If only that were the case with Roland Emmerich’s INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE, the 20 years in the making follow-up to the highest grossing film of 1996, INDEPENDENCE DAY, that takes the term “unnecessary sequel” to staggeringly new lows. The difference between this and FINDING DORY is that with DORY people actually liked the original; I don't know a single person who's a truly, unironically, a fan of the first ID4 (such a stupid acronym).

Anyway, Will Smith’s character was killed off between films, but Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Judd Hirsch, and Brett Spiner are back for the second invasion by the aliens who come now in a spaceship that’s 30,000 miles wide. That’s what director Emmerich and the four other screenwriters, including James Vanderbilt (ZODIAC – yay! THE AMAZING SPIDERMAN movies – boo!) took away from such sequels as JURASSIC WORLD, which had the biggest dinosaur ever, and STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS, which had a Death Star that was 10 times bigger than the original – that is, make the threat BIGGER.

The plot is exactly what you think it is – aliens attack, we fight back and win. So we’ve got a bunch of incoherently shot and edited dogfights in the second half with series newcomers, Liam Hemsworth and Jessie T. Usher (playing the son of Will Smith’s character) as badass fighter pilots attacking the massive mothership, while the rest of the cast is running around below trying to find out if the new alien spaceship is compatible with the new Apple MacBook Pro.

ID4 2 (is that the right acronym?) is a dreadful, boring experience, made worse by unconvincing CGI and horribly written and acted dialogue.  The only memorable line is spoken by Goldblum: “they like to get the landmarks.” 



The first one was bad but at least it had some semblance of character developement and plotting. This one doesn't even try for either - it just wants big thrills and fails at that.

I saw this POS for free and still felt ripped off. Here’s hoping it doesn’t gross enough to justify a sequel – the plugging of which at the end of this is one of the most cringe worthy movie moments of the year.

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